Web Applications

Network World's Web Applications Newsletter, 09/17/07

Trulia: Making realty easier (not easy)

By Mark Gibbs

Of all of the industries that the Internet transformed, one of the most affected has been the real estate business. The changes this industry has experienced are all due to consumers being able to access more information without having to go through a realtor. While this has obviously removed some of the realtor’s ability to control the consumer their expanded geographic reach and improved market exposure has more than made up for it.

The real breakthrough in online realty was Zillow, which provides price estimates, something that really dismayed many realtors.

In fact the pricing estimates on Zillow are just that, estimates, and when a property has an unusual specification for the area it is in the estimates can be wildly wrong. For example, a property near to me is shown on Zillow to have a value $778,000 when it is set on 3.46 acres and is actually currently on the market listed at $4.4 million!

Another problem I’ve discovered with Zillow is that despite their boast of having 70 million properties listed, properties that are for sale don’t always make it into their database. Again, the property I mentioned above is not shown in Zillow as being on the market.

Another company in the realty search market is Trulia. Launched just about a year ago (September 20060) and (of course) still in beta, Trulia skips the price estimation service and adds a considerable range of analytic tools to help consumers understand both the areas they are interested in and realty world in general.

Trulia is based on realty data expressed through a Google Maps mashup and it is very well done although I would prefer to see more use of AJAX techniques for managing the user interface as the endless screen refreshes for every click get tiring.

On Trulia, consumers can examine properties sold and for sale in an area, find out how a particular property “stacks up” relative to the stats of its “comps,” get the sales history for the property, see overall market stats (historical price data by number of bedrooms), find out about schools, and even post questions to location specific forums. There’s also Trulia Hindsight that provides very cool historical data and animated maps showing realty changes over time.

Trulia provides accounts (for free) so that you can be notified of new homes for sale in a given area and changes in price or status for specific properties. There’s even an API that allows you to get information about a location (neighborhoods, ZIP codes, etc.) and statistics (average and median prices for areas, percentage of Trulia site hits that relate to a specific area, and so on).

But Trulia isn’t just for consumers. Realtors can submit their listings for free and use the service to advertise their services to potential buyers, which is how the service makes money.

I was surprised to find that there appear to be problems when a realtor changes the status of a property because it appears that Trulia may not know for some considerable time that the data has changed.

If anyone from Trulia reads this it was the entry for 1601 Poli Street, Ventura, CA 93001. When I selected the link to the realtor that has the listing, Prudential, I got a page that told me “No properties were found matching your search criteria.”

I tried various searches on the Prudential site and nothing. Trulia notes on their page for the property that the data was updated less than 12 hours ago so perhaps the property sold. That said, don’t realtors usually leave the listing up labeled “sold” for some time greater than 12 hours? I suppose that it is possible that the Prudential site has a problem, but that seems unlikely.

That issue aside Trulia is a big step forward in giving consumers the kind of data that they need to make good decisions about buying and selling property. Will Trulia and its like replace realtors? As Trulia’s CEO commented in a letter he wrote to the New York Times: “… with all this information, it is like trying to drink water from an open fire hydrant. Who has the time to make sense of all this information?”

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist and now blogger: Check out Gibbsblog.

Gibbs not only pens (well, keyboards) this newsletter he also writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World. We’ll spare you the rest of the bio but if you want to know more, go here

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